The Grill: Deloitte's John Hagel talks about the real point of outsourcing and the end of IT as we know it.
Deloitte's IT strategy guru talks about 'innovation blowback,' the real point of outsourcing and the end of IT as we know it.
January 07, 2008 (Computerworld) -- John Hagel has written about "innovation blowback" — the unexpected consequences of investment in emerging markets — as well as other phenomena at the intersection of technology and strategy. His books include Net Worth, Out of the Box and Net Gain.
What is innovation blowback? Most large Western companies have understood the importance of emerging markets and the importance of really innovating for those markets. But that misses a much larger opportunity, which is to not just view them as isolated markets but as seedbeds for innovation that can be used to attack more entrenched positions in more developed countries.
For example, in China, vendors are able to offer handset devices on whatever networks are available, unlike in the U.S., where you need to get your device approved and supported by at least one of the major network service providers. But China is a much more open market, so there's a tremendous amount of innovation in handset devices, which could find its way into the U.S. So business line and IT managers should keep an eye on these developments and start to think more aggressively about using them as testbeds to develop products that can then address a much wider global market.
DOSSIER Name: John Hagel Title: Co-chairman, Center for Strategy and Technology Company: Deloitte & Touche USA LLP Location: San Jose Favorite technology: TiVo Technology pet peeve: "We still don’t have any digital technology as flexible and convenient as pen and paper." In high school he was : "A political activist." Favorite nonwork pastime: Rockabilly and surf music concerts Philosophy in a nutshell: "Find and pursue your passions. There’s plenty of time to sleep later." Last book read:
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Favorite movie : American Graffiti Something people don't know about him:"I have translated medieval Arabic poetry."
What's coming in "green" IT? There is growing recognition that IT devices consume an enormous amount of power. Technology vendors are beginning to make claims about their products' efficiency and power consumption, and yet there is no independent third party to certify these claims. But we will see the emergence of [such] bodies, and it will be a huge help to buyers.
What should IT managers do about the new social networking and collaboration tools invading the enterprise? We are seeing social media tools bleeding into the enterprise from the bottom up. These include wikis, document- sharing tools, instant messaging and so on, and they are generally not sponsored by central IT. The early adopters tend to be project teams, particularly if the teams are geographically distributed.
But don't IT managers have good reason to resist the intrusion of these tools? They have valid concerns, but there is a lot of value in doing some experimentation to understand what the limitations and risks are and to use project teams as experimental testbeds.